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General Exalted Thread

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Ed Greenwood's forum posts are more than horny enough to make up for whatever weird shit didn't show up in 3.5e.
 
Potato Anarchy said:
i have exciting news for you about how incredibly weird and sexual the forgotten realms lore is. everything about the drow makes exalted look on par, really.
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>writes out a few counter examples
>writes last paragraph
>inhales
>deletes examples

Look, I'm not trying to make the argument that Exalted was uniquely bad in this regard (partly because I don't have the breadth of game knowledge to make that claim; I almost exclusively played custom settings in my teens and 20s). I'm pointing out that this is a thing in the game and it's a problem I personally have when trying to recommend it.
 
HalfTangible said:
Look, I'm not trying to make the argument that Exalted was uniquely bad in this regard (partly because I don't have the breadth of game knowledge to make that claim; I almost exclusively played custom settings in my teens and 20s). I'm pointing out that this is a thing in the game and it's a problem I personally have when trying to recommend it.
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Is it a thing in the current game, though, or are these hypothetical players going to have to dig up out of print previous-edition sourcebooks from over a decade ago to find it?
 
Well, you still have to avoid some stuff the previous devs put out in 3e, such as the Tale of the Visiting Flare, but I'm not sure where the bombs are.

To the unaware, in Tale of the Visiting Flare, Rakan Thulio is a full on Psycho Homosexual whose love for a straight guy is called, by the narrator, "a twisted version of natural love", and he responds to rejection by arranging for his crush and all his reincarnations to be murdered. It played into a lot of old ugly tropes to say the least.

The new devs being explicit that they were going to ignore this characterization and do something more respectful was pretty vital to me giving 3e a second chance.
 
Indivisible said:
So for Abyssals, there are three extant Underworld-y that I remember:

Laughing Wounds, which I believe was about getting stronger as you get hurt. Very BDSM themed. I think it used whips and razor harnesses?

Hungry Ghost, which I think was about being spooky? I think it used tiger claws?

Ivory Pestle, which was about resonating with the earth in your bones and beating up ghosts. I think it used batons and staffs and was basically escrima.


Does anyone remember any other deathly martial arts that they're hoping for?
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Laughing Wounds has beens tated by writers and devs probably as to not come back. It's kind of just "BDSM but evil the Martial Art" and kind of tasteless. The amount of rehabilitation needed for it you might as well just do a style that has a dfiferent name and less baggage.

Hungry Ghost I'd be surprised if it weren't there.

Ivory Pestle was broken as shit if I remember correctly, though had some cool aesthetics.
 
HalfTangible said:
...

I'm hoping that at some point I can narrow down what's in that asterisk to "just don't read anything before 3e, trust me". Which at minimum is going to require the Infernals and Abyssals books to come out.
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I kind of feel as neat as Hell and Infenrals are, we're pretty much there when we get Abyssals and Across the 8 DIrections. I think that for the Hell and Infernals stuff I'd just say 'Read the chapter in Games of Divinity and Eric Minto's Ink Monkeys and just kind of wait on that" more than worrying about much else for a bit.

I honeslty think something on the Wyld is more needed than anything, as I don't think it's been presented in a useful or interesting fashion in any edition. But in this case it is something so underutilized well in the gamleine it might as well just be new content.
 
Blaque said:
Laughing Wounds has beens tated by writers and devs probably as to not come back. It's kind of just "BDSM but evil the Martial Art" and kind of tasteless. The amount of rehabilitation needed for it you might as well just do a style that has a dfiferent name and less baggage.

Hungry Ghost I'd be surprised if it weren't there.

Ivory Pestle was broken as shit if I remember correctly, though had some cool aesthetics.
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Yeah, I wasn't sure if there was anything salvageable in Laughing Wounds, since I didn't buy the Abyssals 2e book and had only heard of it.

As I recall, Ivory Pestle's problem was that it was a Terrestrial Martial Art with the power of a Celestial Martial Art, but since 3e smooshed them together it's less of a problem. If nothing else it's a cool concept.
 
HalfTangible said:
I always hesitate recommending Exalted to people because it will always come with an asterisk. A fucking HUGE asterisk with an essay's worth of lines that boils down to "avoid like half of what this game has actually published because this game gets weird and creepy in places, not always in the fun way".

Imagine: you are an unstoppable champion of the sun, on the run from sentai dragon monks with magic martial arts that think you're a demon, able to not only shrug off ballista shots but cut through entire regiments of enemies in a single blow. It's awesome to beat down the door of the dark lord, cut through his undead legions alongside your werewolf soulmate who can turn into a T-Rex, the noble eldest son of an ancient line of heroes who have sworn a blood oath against this demonic foe, and a little girl annointed by the stars themselves to push back the darkness... And then the big bad turns out to have 7 diseased wangs because nobody's ever made a priest joke before haha laugh with me I'M PROTESTANT

Yes I realize that the team has changed, the Abyssals book is coming out, you can change stuff about the game if you need to, and that specific example is not a thing anymore(probably) but Exalted's lore as written has a lot of moments like that, where you're reading about something that SOUNDS really awesome and then suddenly you run headfirst into the kind of faux maturity that high schoolers think is deep.

"Then just don't talk about that stuff!"

If I don't bring that up, then they're eventually going to find it and freak out. Understandably for some of this shit.

I'm hoping that at some point I can narrow down what's in that asterisk to "just don't read anything before 3e, trust me". Which at minimum is going to require the Infernals and Abyssals books to come out.
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I feel that '2e was pretty fucked up, don't read those books' is in fact... perfectly adequate as a solution? Like, most people who got into Exalted with 3e haven't read those books and don't plan to, much like how people who got into D&D at 5e do not go out and buy collections of 3.5 or 4e books as a general rule.

Like, fuck it's not like most modern D&D players are super familiar with how incredibly fucking horny Faerun is as a setting because most of them haven't read any of Greenwood's stuff. They've probably read the Player's Handbook (not a guarantee) and have skimmed a couple of other books (if you're lucky).

I'm not even sure why you think you can't say 'just don't read anything before 3e, trust me' prior to Abyssals or Infernals coming out. Is it somehow mandatory that they read those splats?
 
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I sorta get it, since the line fir years is that Infernals were absolutely the best and coolest parts of Exalted which saved the gameline and everyone shoukd read… except for that one part tho, but it's also significantly less true nowadays with the across the board improvement of the lore.
 
The things that got me interested in Exalted in the first place were Abyssal and Infernal quests, but I've not felt particularly bad about the fact that neither splat is available for 3e for the moment. The existing stuff (Core, Lunars, DBs, Realm etc.) was plenty to keep me hooked, and it's kept me pretty excited for the new campaigns to come.
 
SunnySprings said:
All this stuff about how well Exalted 3e sold and the number of backers proves that Exalted has a stable fanbase (and that is an achievement), but I can't ever see it growing like it did from 1e to 2e, which is what generally drives active discussion; new fans with new takes on things make things more interesting and bring in new ideas more than the same 20 or so people going on about stuff they've already discussed in like 2013.
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So, I'm actually in the early stages of running an ExEss game for a group with three players who are relatively unfamiliar with Exalted. One of them is a friend of mine who works in RPG design herself; I've been spending a lot of time chatting with her trying to familiarize her with the setting and mechanics, and what you're describing here is an issue she's been running into a lot. Her experience was that there was a lot of stuff that felt underexplained or did not parse as a design choice, which would suddenly snap into place after she mentioned it to me and I said something to the effect of "Oh yeah, that's a change from [older edition] where [thing was different]."

There's a level of assumed familiarity with the setting and history of the game that I had that she just didn't, to the point that it's become a bit of a running joke between us. And I say that as someone who's not particularly familiar with Exalted! Most of the familiarity I do have comes from lurking in this thread for the past several years, and I've been having to rely a lot on the one friend in the group who's been playing since the 2E days to double-check stuff for me when it comes to lore from older editions. On top of that, I've been making a point of looking through older material as well. While that's massively increased my appreciation for how much work 3E's done to clean things up, it's also hard not to notice where 3E and ExEss assume you're familiar with stuff described back in 1E instead of presenting them as novel concepts that need explaining.
 
How I explained bad 2e lore to my fresh table was 'White Wolf did a White Wolf' and they instantly got it.
 
I absolutely remember, when 3e core first came out, a recurring major criticism I had was the book presumes at least passing familiarity with the setting and its concepts. Like in the grand scheme of things this is a minor quibble, but to me it stands out because I remember it being one of the first things 2e core talked about, but we are several books in and we still don't have a description of what the higher and lower soul are, and by extension what, specifically, a hungry ghost is, and considering what type if ghost pops out of your body is *directly* correlated to what soul it's forming out of I feel like that's a baffling oversight.

Core is filled with that sort of thing to, like for mount speeds a Simhata is name dropped with NO explanation what that even is, basically no terminology for the Fae like middlemarches or freeholds are really explained. It's all a bunch of stuff that even when seemingly minor all just add up.
 
I have been reading Kerisgame and had a dream about it. Which consisted of reading a scene in which Jacinct explains to Keris that the birdhemoth who lives in her workshop manse had been horrifyingly powerful and she should maybe stop trying to let it out. I then woke up, wondered how Elloge made something that powerful by accident.

So for those who don't know/have forgotten the Paricehet (I think) were a behemoth created by Elloge which was a hivemind flock of birds who would spell out their thoughts. At one point they made war on the Unquestionable (which might have meant on all the Unquestionable) until they were crippled and imprisoned by Ligier, Erembour, and the Shashalme working together.

Both the Paricehet and the Shashalme (a Third Circle of Metagaos based around gift giving, greed, and infection) are creations of Earth Scorpion.
 
Because I have miraculous ladybug brainrot despite never having watched the damn show, I now have a silly kernel of an idea:

Hawkmoth as an Unquestionable.
 
Blaque said:
Laughing Wounds has beens tated by writers and devs probably as to not come back. It's kind of just "BDSM but evil the Martial Art" and kind of tasteless. The amount of rehabilitation needed for it you might as well just do a style that has a dfiferent name and less baggage.
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Funny, I remember hearing it'll be coming back with Abyssals. I forget the details, but it was something about, less 'BDSM Caricature: The Martial Art', and more 'fanatical flagellation/berserkers'. Being fuelled by pain can be a kink thing, but there's a much wider pool of inspirations available there.
 
Grytorm said:
I have been reading Kerisgame and had a dream about it. Which consisted of reading a scene in which Jacinct explains to Keris that the birdhemoth who lives in her workshop manse had been horrifyingly powerful and she should maybe stop trying to let it out. I then woke up, wondered how Elloge made something that powerful by accident.

So for those who don't know/have forgotten the Paricehet (I think) were a behemoth created by Elloge which was a hivemind flock of birds who would spell out their thoughts. At one point they made war on the Unquestionable (which might have meant on all the Unquestionable) until they were crippled and imprisoned by Ligier, Erembour, and the Shashalme working together.

Both the Paricehet and the Shashalme (a Third Circle of Metagaos based around gift giving, greed, and infection) are creations of Earth Scorpion.
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The Yozis are worlds unto themselves.

Not all that occurs within them is by their will; not all their melodies are planned.

Sometimes you just get a nest of eggs on the edge of the haemolytic holographic universe, which hatch into strange birds whose bodies are many but whose mind is one, who are a species and a language and are singular. And as the language grows, it becomes more sophisticated, more complicated, more capable to express itself and concieve new things. Until it grows hubristic enough to set itself against those titanspawned demons who rule these sum-of-worlds, and is cast back down to a caged curiosity.

Such things happen in Malfeas; the title "Unquestionable" is aspiration, not immutable law.
 
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TBH, even a BDSM kink martial art wouldn't necessarily be terrible if only it weren't also the "evil twisted bad type of sex" martial art primarily practiced by the evil dead guys splat.

To bad it was written by middle 00s White Wolf.
 
Kingfisher said:
TBH, even a BDSM kink martial art wouldn't necessarily be terrible if only it weren't also the "evil twisted bad type of sex" martial art primarily practiced by the evil dead guys splat.

To bad it was written by middle 00s White Wolf.
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The funny thing is the original Laughing Wounds Style was co-written firsthand by at least one BDSM lifestyler; Lydia Laurenson is open about having written a years-long BDSM blog under the pseudonym of 'Clarisse Thorn' (she's even put up a couple of her old books for free download on substack), though there's nothing public about the co-writer, Dustin Shampel. Apparently they were a wee bit too focused on making it 'true' at the expense of other concerns, but it does change how it comes off more than a bit.
 
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Imrix said:
Funny, I remember hearing it'll be coming back with Abyssals. I forget the details, but it was something about, less 'BDSM Caricature: The Martial Art', and more 'fanatical flagellation/berserkers'. Being fuelled by pain can be a kink thing, but there's a much wider pool of inspirations available there.
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I have never seen it mentioned by devs as something they wanted to do. And even in the 3e corebook, where there was the fan choice MA, that one was on the veto list to my gathering.

Current team might think they can pull it off, but last I saw the vibe was generally "Do something actually cool and call it a name that fits instead of rehabilitate the style with baggage."

Something to consider is that even if they made it more a berserker/flagelation style, folks who heard fo the 2e one will call it the BDSM style and this will likely in effect taint what it is presented as or played by a bit of th eplayer base there.
 
The real hiccup in 3rd edition so far was the whole "BTW we're going to take two, three years where nothing comes out except incremental stuff" period. Things are going briskly now, but we're still waiting on shit like the Lunar companion book if I'm not mistaken.
 
EX3 had a rough time from the start, what with the Kickstarter debacle, delays, rewrites, and team changes, followed by the collective nightmare of the pandemic grinding most everything to a halt.
 
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